Castiel, Tattoos, and Really Small Towns
by Aisho9
Summary: It's hunting time! This time Castiel's along for the ride. Oneshot. Features Castiel, Jordan Delaine, and  some  Sam.


So, yes, I'm posting a third Jordan fanfic - even though it's basically an epilogue of "Some Kind of Mojo," this story arc is completely independent, and mostly about Castiel. So. A little afraid of short-shirting my favorite angel, I decided to post this as a separate story. xD Also it was a bit like - I realized the baykok story arc was novel-length, and as I'm already working on a novel, I shelved him for a bit. (I think I'll go back to him - so. many. possibilities.) ANYWAY. A FANFICTION. INVOLVING JORDAN AND CASTIEL. ENJOY. xD

* * *

The bar was a crummy one. It stank of cheap booze and cigarettes, and its populace was of the plaid-and-ball-cap variety, fresh off the highway. The jukebox was broken, and looked to have been that way for the better part of a decade, but somewhere in the back someone had plugged in a radio. It was playing a long stream of classic rock, recognizable only by the electric guitar, as the music was too garbled by static to make out the lyrics.

It was reasonable to say that Pete's had never, in all its days, weeks, months, years of being open, been witness to what Pete (owner, barkeep, and handyman) referred to as a Real Goshdarn Woman. Pete's existed solely to wet the whistles of the truckers off the highway, although it did have a few regular patrons from nearby Huncherton, all of whom wore the same uniforms as the trucks and referred to their wives (if they had wives, that is) as their Old Lady. No one ever objected to this title, as it was largely the truth; pretty girls born in Huncherton either left before they reached sixteen or got themselves hooked on something that turned them un-pretty faster than you could say Bobby-Jo's Smoking Crack.

The one exception to this was Miss Pondwater, the librarian, who was about fifty but looked forty, and had been imported from someplace god-awful far, like Seattle, or San Francisco, or Salem—something with an S, anyway. She was a looker, had a spine made of steel, and took no crap off of anybody. Huncherton and the surrounding areas counted themselves lucky to have a library and all and generally treated Miss Pondwater like their unofficial mayor. (Their real mayor was Bill Jorgens, and he was a fat old drunk who had trouble getting out of chairs.)

In any case Miss Pondwater would have never gone into Pete's, which Pete accepted as a matter of course—Miss Pondwater was a lady, and ladies did not go into establishments such as Pete's—and so Pete's would have retained its reputation as being ignorant of Real Goshdarn Women if that string of killings hadn't cropped up, and with them Jordan Delaine.

She drove up in a red GTO, which caught most everyone's eye right off, because a car that nice had never once pulled up to Pete's, and stepped out looking like something out of a magazine, which caught everyone's else's. Even Margaret O'Hare, who worked at the grocer down the street, stopped sweeping the sidewalk to stare openmouthed at the woman who was stepping out of the red GTO.

Jordan was wearing painted-on jeans, a leather jacket, and a plain white T-shirt, which was all fairly eye-catching but otherwise understandable (except perhaps the painted-on part), but she was also sporting a pair of bright blue sneakers, which should have been silly, but looked as appealing as sprinkles on a sundae to old hairy Pete, who was watching her, like everyone else, through his bar's grubby windows. She swung her long dark hair over her shoulder, slammed shut the door to her GTO, and came striding into Pete's like it was nothing.

Everyone stared. Hell, everyone was _already_ staring, but she seemed not to notice it one bit. She slid onto a barstool and tapped the wood once with a forefinger, in a practiced gesture that said she was no stranger to drinking in bars, and said in a brusque voice, "Best lager you've got, barkeep."

This had two simultaneous reactions: shock that a woman—a Real Goshdarn Woman—was sitting in Pete's bar, drinking; and utter incredulity that the word "lager" had passed through her lips. Huncherton and the surrounding areas had gotten used to the idea that women elsewhere were like Miss Pondwater, who, if she drank at all, sipped at a coke and gin, heavy on the coke. When Pete didn't immediately react to this request of hers, being too dumbstruck to answer, she raised an imperious eyebrow and said, pointedly, "_Beer_?" She sounded as if she thought Pete might be slow.

Like a rubber band snapping, Pete jerked into movement, and abruptly the others took to their drinks again, and talk resumed; but all eyes were still on Jordan, and the talk was all about her.

"What brings you round these parts?" asked Pete, in his best bartender voice, and there was a sudden hush as everyone leaned in to listen.

"I'm here as a favor to Detective Mitchell, up in Sacramento," she answered, which was wholly unexpected, although none of them had been able to comprehend a better explanation. "I'm a private investigator up that way. Anyway, they're really bogged down, so I'm here to take a looksee."

Pete had never heard of the police using PIs before, but he figured this was probably because city folk did things different, and so he took this in stride. "About the killings, you mean?"

"Exactly so," answered Jordan, taking the beer from him and taking a practiced swig. As she did so, her leather jacket hiked up a bit, and instead of seeing a narrow bit of skin, as they'd expected, the bar's patrons were instead treated to the sight of a handgun, tucked negligently back into her belt. It was a pretty silver thing, a Sig-Sauer, and had been oiled to a high shine. Those close enough to see saw the telltale marks of wear along its grip that said she'd handled it often.

"Don't know what you think you'll find," said Pete. "People just up and vanish, is all."

"They don't vanish," said Jordan. She took another swig. "They're being left next county over, strung up in a barn."

Pete's eyebrows shot up. "They _what_?"

Jordan gave a nonchalant shrug. "They're strung up, as I said. Whoever did it is probably a butcher, it'd been done quite neatly. The knots they used were works of art."

"Miss—you weren't _there_?" Pete murmured, looking very pale. Jordan seemed to find this funny, and after a moment of chuckling into her beer, she said, "Of course I was there, I'm investigating them, aren't I? Hell, I was the one who found them. Don't the police search the woods around here anymore?"

This was right about where they stopped thinking she was pretty and started thinking about visiting church. Father Darrow was probably asleep in his armchair by now, but he could be coaxed out to hear confessions if you offered him sweets (or whiskey—whichever you liked). Pretty women sniffing out dead bodies strung up in barns was tantamount to saying the Devil was walking through town, which perhaps wasn't too far from the truth.

What Jordan hadn't told them was that the people had _literally_ been butchered, and hung up to cure like sides of beef, all of which, combined with battered pews, a book written in cuneiform, and an alter sporting an Evils'R'Us selection of blood, knuckle bones, and braids of human hair suggested a cult—a bad one. A quick Google search had turned up a few unsettling legends about a six-person cult of ancient times that used cannibalism to fuel its magic, and that made it official hunter business.

It was the third solo hunt Jordan had gone on this year. Four months after the baykok episode, she and the Winchesters had come to the uneasy realization that if said baykok was going to come after Jordan, it wasn't doing it anytime soon. None of them really thought it had given up—this thing was centuries old and could afford to be patient. A few weeks after this realization had hit, Jordan had split to do her first solo, and had returned bearing a tattoo of a sun around her bellybutton.

"It was to commemorate the occasion," she told Sam and Dean, standing in front of them with her T-shirt hiked up so they could see it. They were both bending down with eyes as round as saucers. "Also Melody—she's this girl I met, real sweetheart, killer left hook—got me drunk as a skunk afterwards and we both got tattoos. Hers is of Daffy Duck and it's about the size of my head, so be glad this is the worst of the damage."

Jordan figured that if the baykok wasn't going to finish the business between them right away, there was no reason to put off her training. Her second solo had been demons, three of them, and she'd tackled them entirely on her own. Because it'd seemed like the thing to do, she got another tattoo—well, tattoos; she'd gotten tiny crosses inked on the inside of her wrists, which had the added benefit of being useful in a demon fight—and Jordan started to feel like perhaps she was a real hunter now. The boys didn't quite agree, and so she'd left on her third hunt. An ancient cannibal cult seemed like just the thing to prove her mettle.

She thought maybe she'd get the Enochian symbol for angel on the back of her neck next. Then she could tell people that the sun represented her, the crosses were her boys, and the symbol was for Cas. Everyone all together, her crazy, monster-hunting family.

Except Bobby. She couldn't think of anything except a baseball cap for Bobby, and she'd be damned if she inked a baseball cap on her skin.

"They did their due diligence," Pete said, after clearing his throat uncomfortably. The sheriff's brother was sitting near the broken down jukebox, and he figured it was best to lie.

"Right," agreed Jordan, and managed to sound convincing. She drank down the rest of her beer and lifted a finger for another. She hadn't come into town for information. These people didn't know diddlysquat, and she knew it. She'd come into town because she had a hunch—Huncherton, get it, ha-ha?—that a cult, especially the secretive kind, had to set up residence _somewhere_. Her bet was on Huncherton, and that if she did an unobtrusive search through the populace, she might hit upon someone with cannibal fever.

Dean probably wouldn't have approved of this idea—he probably would have preferred her Plan B, which is to say, burn down the barn and see who comes running—but it saved her energy for the hard part, which is to say, killing the sick SOBs. She knew from experience that ancient things could be tough as old leather in that department.

She wasn't sure would Sam would have done. She wasn't sure of anything where Sam was considered, nowadays, because they mostly wavered in a stage between best friends and lovers, called themselves boyfriend-girlfriend, and never really went anywhere. It'd gotten to the point now where Jordan wondered if it was _ever_ going anywhere.

Because the Winchesters worked like that, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She slid it out and took a peek at its screen. _How's it going? – S_

How's it going? It's going swell, honey bear, Jordan thought. My Sig-Sauer's loaded for a proverbial bear and my boyfriend's spinning his goddam tires because he can't decide if he likes me better as his friend or his girlfriend.

This was unlikely to fit in a text, however, so she hit "reply" and wrote instead, _OK._ Send. Let him chew on that for a bit. Okay as in "just peachy, see you soon" or okay as in "not so well, please come rescue me"? She could imagine the furrow appearing between his brows and almost smiled.

"You have a doctor in town?" Jordan asked the barkeep, while she waited to see how Sam would respond. He shook his head, making the little bright spot on his bald head move from his forehead to the back of his head and back again.

"Nope," he said. "Hafta drive damn near thirty minutes to reach a doctor. Miss Pondwater knows how to patch things up, though, and she's had learning as a midwife, so we mostly use her."

Jordan perked up her ears at this. The denizens of the particular cult she was hunting had aliases: Firewort, Thumb-ha, Sunbug, Lionmouth, Darkwood. Pondwater. They were names that sounded impressive in their original tongues but lacked something in English, especially Thumb-ha, which Jordan thought would be a great name for a goldfish nonetheless. "Pondwater? Who's she?"

"Librarian," answered Pete. "Runs the town, basically."

Jordan found this interesting. Very interesting indeed. It made sense that the cult would need the town under their thumb; it lessened the likelihood that they'd be found out. She gave a thoughtful nod. "Mm."

"Best thing that ever happened to Huncherton," Pete declared, and there was a muffled chorus of "here, here" from all around them. Jordan found she wasn't as enthusiastic.

Monsters wore many guises.

* * *

Back in her hotel room, three towns away, Jordan was watching the nightly news, crummy with static, and scribbling notes of what she'd learned that day into a notebook. There were little doodles interspersed through its pages, some of the barn, the bodies, the alter—anything she wanted to remember, but a camera not being on hand, had sketched instead. The doodles in the front of her notebook, from her first hunt, were awkward and looked vaguely third grader, but these she was churning out now weren't so shabby, and there was a portrait of Pete at the top of the page that was actually pretty damn good. She thought that when she caught up with the boys again, she might try sketching them next.

Thinking of them made her lonely, but she was still irked at Sam for not texting her back, and wasn't about to call Dean, who had finally been goaded into taking a vacation with Lisa and Ben to a lake somewhere. The next best thing to a Winchester, though, was Castiel, and so she left her eyes drift shut and said in a respectful voice, "God, if you can spare him, send down Castiel, if you please. Amen."

She knew he was there before she even opened her eyes. She'd heard the telltale rustle, but the air had changed, too, more—full. Full of what, she couldn't say. She smiled as her eyes opened, already saying, "Cas!"

He looked at her, expression not exactly cheerful, but not exactly irritable, either. She got out of her chair and crossed over to get a hug, a trick she had taught him a while back that was, in her opinion, far more valuable than any waltz. He wrapped his arms around her obligingly and even gave a squeeze, which he had taken to doing all on his own, and because she'd missed him a little more than usual, she gave him a smart kiss on the cheek before letting him go.

"How's it hanging in Heaven, Cas?" she asked him, and finally she saw a hint of a smile.

"Better," he said, simply, but it was a statement that she knew meant the world to him, and so she grinned at him. His gaze flicked to her notebook. "You're on a hunt?"

"You betcha. A whole cult, on my lonesome."

His blue eyes narrowed a little at this, and he said unhappily, "Sam and Dean are not with you?"

"Nope," Jordan said, turning to pick up the notebook so she could show him her doodles. "I'm doing solo hunts now. This is my third, actually."

"Third," repeated Castiel, sounding unhappier than ever.

She stopped and looked at him. "Why, is that a problem?"

"It is perhaps unwise," Castiel said, and had he been Sam or Dean, she would have immediately taken offense; but this was Cas, and so she took a moment to translate it into what he actually meant, which is to say, "This makes me very anxious, and I'm worried about you." Castiel wasn't great in the whole emotions department.

"I've been doing all right on my own, Cas," Jordan assured him with a smile, and stuck out her notebook for him to see, her elbows locked like a little girl. "Look! I've started drawing."

For his credit, he took to notebook and scrutinized its pages before saying anything. "If I had known this," he said, "I would not have stayed so long in Heaven."

"What, drawing?" Jordan asked, being purposefully dense, because she liked the idea of being self-sufficient for once. Castiel flipped a page in her notebook, as gently as if he were handling vellum. She thought he might be about to speak, so she suggested brightly, "I'm going to draw you!"

Castiel looked at her like he maybe knew she was avoiding the issue, so she got out her pencil with all due haste and made him stand by the window, where the streetlamps blazed in and made the bones of his face stand out. She sketched in silence and he stood in silence. This, she thought, was one of the best things about Cas. He was an insta-friend, and he came with a mute button.

The portrait she made wasn't very good—she'd messed up his nose, and his lips, and his chin, and oh, hell, she'd messed up all of it—but you could sort of tell, if you tilted the paper, that it was him. She signed the bottom with a flourish that was quite unnecessary and then, because she felt whimsical, put "To Cas, Love Jory" on the top. She ripped it out and handed it over for him to see, and she was astonished to see him flush, from his collar right up to his eyeballs.

"For me?" he asked, uncertainly, and Jordan felt a pang of something like pity. She didn't think Castiel was much in the habit of getting gifts.

"Yeah, 'course it is, big guy," she said, and with infinite care, he folded it and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, right over his heart. "Look, I know this isn't a very angelic thing to do, but you want to watch some TV with me for a bit? It's been ages since I've hung out with anyone."

"Okay," said Castiel, without any hesitation, and he sat down robotically on the edge of the bed, where the TV was. She sprawled out on her belly beside him and turned the channel to Law and Order reruns. Castiel's face stayed locked in its most impassive state, which she took to mean that he didn't hate it. She hummed gently under her breath as she situated a pillow under her arms, locked her feet at the ankles, and wiggled until she'd made a little indentation in the coverlet. TV with friends—that was the good stuff. Finally, all settled in, she set her chin on the pillow, focused her eyes on the television screen, and promptly fell asleep.

* * *

When she awoke she was still facing the foot of the bed, but the covers had been turned over so that they laid over her. The morning light trickled in through the windows, making her blink, and as she sat up she saw a little square of paper resting on the nightstand.

_Sorry I could not stay. Hope you slept well. Thank you for the drawing. Castiel_

She had a brief moment of regret at having not stayed awake longer, but decided that in the long run she'd at least cheered Castiel up a bit, which he always seemed to need, no matter what the state of affairs might be. Castiel, the angelic Eeyore.

There was a missed call and a text waiting for her on her phone, too. The call was from Dean, probably to check in—it hadn't been important, or he would have left a message—and the text was from Sam. _Finished the haunting in Salt Lake. Want company?_

There was a question. Company, yes. Sam? Maybe. She'd gotten so fed up with the constant confusion of being his sorta-kinda-girlfriend for the better part of a year that she'd built up a kind of impatience with the whole thing, which was probably not helping anything. She thought—or believed, or knew—that he was serious about her, but she wasn't at all sure where that led. The last time he'd been serious about a girl, she'd ended up barbequed, which probably wasn't helping anything.

Finally, because she couldn't make up her mind, and a Winchester was always better than no Winchester, she responded, _Duh_. Although she might very well be finished with the hunt by then, as Jordan had an idea.

This idea was actually a branch-off of her Plan B, because Dean, even the Dean in her head, was usually right. If Miss Pondwater was the town cornerstone _and_ in the cult, which Jordan felt fairly sure she was, then it might be safe to say she was the also the head of the cult. People in power liked to stay in power—that was Jordanism #32.

Jordanism #1 was "Never mess with a Winchester."

In which case the very public incineration of the cult's barn might be just the thing to provoke Miss Pondwater, especially if Jordan publically admitted to being the one who'd torched the place. She figured that in this scenario, a High Noon showdown would be in her favor. Cults were better with shadowy curses and late-night murders, not quick-draws by sunlight.

Step One: Torch the barn.

With this in mind, Jordan got around, dressed in a sensible black ensemble that was basically the mirror image of the one she'd wore the day before, except with black skinny jeans and a black T-shirt—her "mugger's outfit," as she liked to call it—and locked up her motel room. When she turned around, however, she found herself staring into a pair of very, very blue eyes.

"Cas," she said, accusingly. "You scared me half to death."

"Sorry," he said. He didn't look it, but that was hardly surprising. "I thought maybe you might like my help."

"Because you think I need it or because you're worried about me?"

His brows came together at this, making him look very puzzled and slightly like a baby bird as his head began to tilt—slowly—sideways—Jordan decided on the latter. "Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm just about to go burn down a barn."

She thought she saw him smile a little, the punk. He knew that head quirk thing of his was practically her Achilles heel. Because, gosh darn it, it was _cute_ and he looked so damnably _young_ when he did it. "Sometimes, Cas," she said, getting into her GTO, "you remind me of a little kid."

He didn't answer. This was probably because he knew this already, and had been using it to his blatant advantage for months. (She could recall one particular incident involving a bacon cheeseburger and Castiel's very empty wallet some time back, in which she had sacrificed her last fiver, but only following another one of those devastating head quirks.)

She drove them back towards Huncherton, and midway there, she had an idea. Torch the place? That was good. _Blow_ the place? That was better. She grinned a little to herself, which earned her a narrow look from Castiel, a thing she missed entirely as she was giving a driver in a black Ford truck the finger for trying to cut her off.

When they pulled up to the barn, it was empty, except that it was now sporting police tape; she parked back a ways, in the midst of a rash of tire marks. If anyone looked for her treads, they'd have a heck of a time telling them apart from all the others. She advised Castiel to jump out of the car, to avoid the tracks, to which he responded by simply vanishing.

"Angels," Jordan said in a huff, and tiptoed her way out of the GTO.

She opened the GTO's trunk, and then opened a false bottom not unlike Dean's. The difference was that she'd upholstered it in black leather and had added neat little straps with which to secure her things, plus a black metal box in the bottom that, when raised, revealed a setup almost like a tackle box, except that it contained fun things like bullets, throwing knives, grenades, stakes, and—this was the bit she was after—the makings of a truly magnificent bomb. ("It's like a box in a box in a box," Jordan told Dean, who did not approve of so many lids. "Like—surprise! False bottom. Surprise! Guns. Surprise! C4. The police will think it's Christmas.")

She took the C4, it's detonator, and a wad of wiring, stuffing it into her jacket pocket, and shut up her GTO's many lids. She locked up the lot of it, just in case, and then went to join Castiel at the side of the road, on a patch of high, dry grass that wouldn't leave tracks.

"You are going to destroy it?" he asked her, with the slightest of nods towards the barn.

"No, buddy, I'm going to _smite_ it," said Jordan with a grin. "And then I'm going to sit back and watch who comes scurrying."

One of his eyebrows lifted a hair, which she took as tacit compliance, and set of in the direction of the security tape. He did help her set up the bomb, at least. She stuck all the C4 in and he wired it up, although this was possibly also because her wiring jobs always, always sucked.

"Okay," she said, when they were done, and pushed back a stray hair from her forehead. "I think that's good. Got the detonator?"

Castiel lifted it so she could see it.

"Good. Let's get back in the GTO and get the heck out of dodge. The detonator's got a range of about a hundred feet anyway."

They picked their way back to the GTO, staying away from wet patches and long grass, and drove away at what felt like a snail's pace (but, alas, it was better than gunning it, and leaving their treads so obviously deeper than the rest); once they reached the edge of the dirt road, Jordan gave the nod to Castiel.

Nothing.

"Cas, hit it," she added, just in case he'd missed the nod, but he didn't respond, only stared at her, baffled. "What's wrong?"

"You want me to blow it up," said Cas, in a troubled rumble, and after a moment's silence, Jordan said, "That barn is where they _eat people_, Cas."

He blinked once. Twice. And then—"Oh." Down came his thumb, and the GTO came roaring out of the dirty road and back onto pavement as a massive explosion rocked through the forest. Pretty much as she'd anticipated, the road was empty. Huncherton wasn't exactly a bustling metropolis. She drove at a fairly sedate pace in the wrong direction and then drove into Huncherton from another way, which was for the police's benefit only, as in a very short moment she was going to be walking down Main Street bellowing her guilt.

Castiel did not know this, of course, and so he found himself bobbing in her wake, horrified, when ten minutes later she began her march towards the library, shouting about what she'd done and flavoring it with a few obscenities. People came outside to watch her, openmouthed.

When she was a little ways from the library, a tall, sharp-boned woman Jordan guessed was Miss Pondwater came out, and sure enough, right around her neck was a necklace sporting her name—but in its original language, of course. To anyone not in the know, it probably just looking like an intricate bit of metalwork.

"What nonsense are you going on about?" she demanded, chin raised imperiously.

"Lady," said Jordan, with a jovial smile, "I burnt down your friggin' den of iniquity."

Castiel squinted at her.

"_My_ den of iniquity?" Miss Pondwater demanded. There was color beginning to rise in her cheeks now.

"Yes, _yours_. I could hardly believe it when that pokey bartender told me your name. I mean, really. Did you think there was no one in the world left who could read it? Or recognize that thing hanging around your neck? _Pondwater_—but I'm guessing the others didn't have quite your cojones. I mean, Thumb-ha would have a tough time blending in, right?"

Miss Pondwater went scarlet with rage. "You read our sacred texts!" she spat, and Jordan saw the beginnings of horror on the faces of the townspeople. Good. Maybe they'd get to see what sort of monster they'd been kowtowing to.

"Sure did, honey," said Jordan. She was still smiling pleasantly. "I also just blew them sky high. You see that pillar of smoke over my right shoulder? That'd be the smoking rubble of your creepy little barbeque barn."

Miss Pondwater came at her, pretty much as Jordan had predicted, and so Jordan put a neat little bullet hole through her forehead. She said to no one in particular, "You may be a few hundred years old, lady, but you're not Superman. I can still put bullet holes in you."

One more came running out—two. That left three of the cannibal band, but that, she decided, was where Castiel came in. "The last three will be trying to run," she told him. "Think you can find them?"

He gave her a slightly scoffing look and vanished, earning a gasp from their audience. A moment later he reappeared out of one of the buildings, a store with an apartment overtop, hustling three murderous-looking and yet fairly average honkytonk joes.

"We curse your name!" one of them roared. "We curse your mother, we curse your father, we curse your children!"

Jordan punched him. Her jovial smile was gone now, wiped entirely from her face. "You can curse my name," she said. "It's just a name. You can curse my mother, and you can curse my father—they're dead and don't care. But my children? They're as of yet unborn, and I'm not looking to see them born into a world precursed."

He spat a wad of blood onto the pavement and opened his mouth to continue, and so Jordan put her Sig-Sauer to his head, and made sure he felt it. "Say it," she snapped. "I dare you."

He shut his mouth.

"That's what I thought," she said. "Coward." She lifted the gun off his head and went about handcuffing them instead, and then used a length of twine to rope them all together, back-to-back-to-back. She took out her notebook and wrote out a note. _These are for you – I think you'll find they've all been eating human meat for a while now. My friendly advice is to not let them wave their hands. Just saying. xoxo Jordan_

She taped it to the head of the man who'd tried cursing her family—with duck tape; he'd have some fun when they tried taking it off, heh-heh—and then turned to face the townspeople of Huncherton. "Someone better call the police to come pick up their trash," she said, and after a pause, someone went scrambling for a phone. Jordan reached out a hand to Castiel, who took it after a moment's hesitation. "Beam me up, Scotty," she said, and with a twinkle in his eyes, Castiel gave her the absolute tiniest of winks.

* * *

They reappeared on a deserted road in what looked like Nevada, the GTO sitting innocently beside them. Jordan threw her arms around Castiel with a whoop and then began an energetic dance around the car, even though the heat was oppressive. "Did you see how neat that was?" Jordan yelled at Castiel, who was smiling—actually, truly smiling. "I killed three of 'em in clear daylight in front of a whole town and _got away_! This is one for the history books, baby!"

And then—from on down the road—she heard something. An engine, an exhaust. A trailing echo of something Dean would never in a million years listen to, but Sam, on the other hand—

Jordan turned on the spot, saw the shivering mirage that was the Impala, and took off at a run. There was a screech of tires as the Impala drew to an abrupt halt, and Sam got out in time to catch her when she threw herself at him, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck.

"Whoa!" he said, startled, and was then treated to a rapid-fire blow-by-blow of Jordan's hunt, ending with a triumphant, "And I left them there! In a pile! It was just like from Batman, Sam, it was great! You remember that scene, right? Where Batman leaves the crook on the police department steps—"

"I remember," he said, laughing, and she kissed him.

Castiel cleared his throat uncomfortably.

"Oh yeah, and Cas blew it up," said Jordan, giving him a smile. "The barn I mean. Hit the button and wired it up and everything. Didn't you, Cas?"

Castiel looked slightly taken aback. "Well, yes," he said, and Sam, holding onto Jordan with one hand, extended the other for a handshake. Castiel took it gingerly.

"Congrats, man," said Sam. "How'd it feel?"

"Like I blew something up," responded Castiel, wearing his most inscrutable face—that is, until Jordan reached out and tweaked his cheek gently. He flushed brightly all at once, something Sam observed with something like incredulity.

"He _loved_ it," she said. "He just won't say so."

Castiel didn't say anything. He was fiddling with his necktie and avoiding Sam's eyes.

"And now," Jordan declared, "you all are going to take me to the nearest tattoo parlor, pronto. No, Cas, you have to come too. I'm getting 'angel' tattooed on my neck. In Enochian. So you have to be there to draw it for them."

Castiel's eyes rounded a little. She held out her wrists. "See," she said. "One for each Winchester. Now I get one for you, too. I've got one for every solo hunt. Pretty cool, huh?"

"Tattoos," Castiel said after a moment, "are powerful things."

"Maybe so. This is mostly about family, though."

"Family," Castiel repeated.

"What did you think you were?" Sam asked Cas, eyebrows coming up.

Castiel seemed to struggle with this for a moment, and then he said, awkwardly, "…Useful."

"Put me down," Jordan said to Sam, immediately, and then proceeded to give Castiel the biggest bear hug she could manage. "You are such a friggin' Eeyore," she told him, as he put his arms like she'd showed him, but added that extra Castiel-squeeze too. "I feel like I have a six-year-old with a depression problem. We keep you around because we like you, and you do retarded things like watch television with mortals in podunk motel rooms. You are our favoritist angel ever."

She thought he might be blushing again, so she released him—he was, incidentally—and then pointed east down the highway. "We're caravanning thataway, boys. First tattoo parlor we hit is golden."

The first tattoo parlor was nearly as dirty as Pete's, but the artwork on the walls was amazing, and so Jordan sat in the chair with no compunctions whatsoever about what she was about to do. While the tattoo artist worked, she heard a rustle of paper, and saw in a bit of mirror that Castiel was showing her drawing to Sam. "She drew it for me," he said, proudly, and Jordan's eyes met Sam's in the mirror. He was grinning foolishly, and she thought she probably was, too. Oh, Castiel, she thought. We love you so.


End file.
